March 9, 2015
Green Stamps and Candy Sticks Are Memories of Joy

Faced with a slew of road miles and windshield time can lead one's mind to wandering.  Sometimes the places it meanders to and memories it brushes by can be a pleasant surprise.

While trekking along Interstate 90 the other day I happened to begin to ponder a time when things were rather different when it came to traversing this corner of the state.  

It wasn't often that my family made the sixty mile trip to the big city of Sioux Falls but now and then we did. I recall usually this was to make a stop at the Green Stamps store there where my mother would cash in the cache of trading stamps that she'd been carefully and faithfully accruing and slapping into the stamp booklets.  

That store was a mecca of treasures-and all for the taking for the diligent souls who amassed those little green gummed stamps with every grocery store purchase.  One of my favorite tasks was to lick them and affix them to the pages for her.  (I still love stamps of every sort and rue the fact that the post office makes us peel and stick our stamps these days).  When full, the green stamp book was a valued treasure, worth nearly its weight in gold.  And then we would make the drive to the big city to trade in our stamps.  

Along the way on our adventure, we would drive the "old" state highway 16 to Adrian where we'd steer onto the big Interstate 90.  In Adrian we'd always make a stop at the big red Nickerson Farm barn store and that, to me, is what the best memories are made of.  

It was there that we'd get our choice of myriad flavors of candy sticks, all displayed in glass jars across the counter tops there.  The only problem I recall was deciding which flavor to choose.  We'd happily lick those candy sticks all the way home from the big city.  

Why, you might ask, did we not drive the entire route on the four lane interstate highway?  Well, the fact of the matter is that it didn't exist in those days.  That last leg of the mighty highway that criss-crosses the state of Minnesota was not to be until later in the 70s when construction was completed and the face of the landscape forever transformed.

That was just before the final leg of the length of the interstate through Minnesota was put into place.  Today that spot, near Blue Earth, is commemorated with a plaque but back in 1978, a 4' wide gold concrete line marked the spot where east met west in the completion of the mighty highway.  

Construction on Interstate 90 began in 1961 with a bypass near Austin in the eastern part of the state.  When Minnesota's portion of the interstate was completed over twenty years later, it became part of a 3,099 mile route that ran cross country from east to west coast.

Today the road is an endless stream of activity at any hour of the day or night.  It's truly difficult to imagine a day when it wasn't where it is.  It's a good thing the route was finished from in this corner of the state.  After all, it just wouldn't do to interrupt the flow of traffic by with a break in the ribbon of highway.  

That just might impede progress after all.